Enterprises that use virtual machines (VMs) such as virtual desktops for their employees may have many virtual machines (e.g., on the order of 100,000 virtual machines) stored in disk images on shared network storage. For a host machine to run a virtual machine, that host machine should have an established connection to the storage server that stores the disk image associated with that virtual machine. In traditional virtualization environments, host controllers issue connect commands to the host machine, the connect commands identifying particular storage servers to connect to and how to connect to those particular storage servers. After a connect command has been issued, the host controller issues run virtual machine commands to the host machine. The host controllers additionally issue disconnect commands to the host machine to cause the host machine to disconnect from the storage server.